Real data and musings on the performance of networks, servers, protocols, and their related folks.

Tuesday, August 13, 2013

Go Read "Reducing Web Latency - the Virtue of Gentle Aggression"

One of the more interesting networking papers I've come across lately is Reducing Web Latency: the Virtue of Gentle Aggression. It details how poorly TCP's packet loss recovery techniques map onto HTTP and proposes a few techniques (some more backwards compatible than others) for improving things. Its a large collaborative effort from Google and USC. Go read it.

The most important piece of information is that TCP flows that experienced a loss took 5 times longer to complete than flows that did not experience a loss. 10% of flows fell into the "some loss" bucket. For good analysis go read the paper, but the shorthand headline is that this is because the short "mice" flows of HTTP/1 tend to be comprised mostly of tail packets and traditionally tail loss is only recovered using horrible timeout based strategies.

This is the best summary of the problem that I've seen - but its been understood for quite a while. It is one of the motivators of HTTP/2 and is a theme underlying several of the blog posts google has made about QUIC.

The "aggression" concept used in the paper is essentially the inclusion of redundant data in the TCP flow under some circumstances. This can, at the cost of extra bandwidth, bulk up mice flows so that their tail losses are more likely to be recovered with single RTT mechanisms such as SACK based fast recovery instead of timeouts. Conceivably this extra data could also be treated as an error correction coding which would allow some losses to be recovered independent of the RTT.